1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a product purchase support apparatus and a product purchase support method for supporting customers in making a decision to purchase commodity products in a store or the like, and a product purchase support program, an information creating apparatus, an information creating method, and an information creating program, as well as to a privilege granting system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Product information provided for customers in supermarkets, convenience stores, and the like is limited to information written on product packages (i.e. product names and the like) and information written on panels or the like attached to product display racks. Therefore, customers may strongly desire to get more detailed information on products.
To meet the desire of customers, there has been proposed a system in which a database server storing detailed information on products (in the case of vegetables, production places, producers, agricultural chemicals in use, how to cook, etc. of vegetables, for example; hereinafter referred to as “detailed information”) is set up on the Internet, and in response to a request from a customer's portable information terminal device, the database server sends detailed information on a product to the customer (see e.g. Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2002-56278).The detailed information sent from the database server is displayed e.g. on a liquid crystal panel of the information terminal device. The customer can examine the product by referring to the detailed information displayed on the liquid crystal panel, and then determine whether or not the product should be purchased.
In the above-described system, when the detailed information on the same product is requested by any portable information terminal device (i.e. any customer), the detailed information of the same contents is sent from the database server. In actuality, however, information which customers really desire to obtain differs depending on the preferences of customers, environments where the customers live, and so forth. For example, in determining whether to purchase an electrical appliance “a”, a customer A may attach importance to the influence that the use of the electrical appliance “a” exerts on the environment, while a customer B may attach importance to the design of the same. In spite of the fact that the importance attached to a product by customers when they consider the purchase thereof varies as described above, if the same detailed information is uniformly given to the customers, some customers cannot obtain information that meets their needs.
Further, in the above-described system, the database server only unilaterally gives detailed information on products in response to customers' requests, and therefore it is impossible to clearly understand what influence the detailed information exerts on the customers' decision on the purchase.